1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, a method and a recording medium generally applied in the speech recognition.
2. Description of the Related Art
One reason for the fact that the oral communication is an excellent means for human beings to exchange information is that a listener can help a speaker's speech act or concept forming. In the human speech dialog, therefore, even when the speaker stumbles in his speech, the listener may guess what the speaker intends to say and suggest some candidates helping the speaker remember what he has intended to say. For example, when the speaker cannot remember the word “speech complementing” and stumbles (hesitates) saying “speech, er . . . ”, the listener can help the speaker by asking whether he intended to say “speech complementing?”. In this process, the listener presents a candidate for the word the speaker has intended to say by complementing the fragment of the word the speaker has uttered. Hence, this process may be regarded as word complementing.
The concept of complementing has been widely applied to text interfaces. For example, several text editors (e.g., Emacs and Mule) and UNIX shells (e.g., tcsh and bash) provide the complementing function (called “completion”) for file names and command names. In such a function, when the user presses a key (typically the Tab key) to call the complementing function (hereinafter referred to as “complementing trigger key”), the remaining portion of the fraction of a word that has been typed halfway is complemented. In WWW browsers such as Netscape Communication and Internet Explorer also, the automatic complementing function (called “autocompletion”) for URLs has been introduced, wherein the system provides lists of complementing candidates one after another while the user is typing.
Recently, the complementing function has been introduced into pen-based interfaces. For example, interfaces with automatic complementing functions such as a predictive pen-input interface and POBox have been proposed. (As for the predictive pen-input, refer to Toshikazu FUKUSHIMA and Hiroshi YAMADA, “A Predictive Pen-Based Japanese Text Input Method and Its Evaluation”, Transactions of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 23-30 (1996); for POBox, refer to Masui, T., “An efficient Text Input Method for Pen-based Computers,” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '98), pp. 328-335, 1998).
For a speech input interface, however, the speech complementing input has not been realized because there has been no appropriate means for calling the complementing function while the speech is being inputted.